Why a Lagos car-hire site hides which cars it owns

I’m building a booking site for a car-hire company in Lagos. They own some of the cars they rent out, and now they want to add cars that belong to other people, owners who’d rather the car make money than sit in the compound. Last week we had to decide if customers should be able to tell which car is which.

My first thought was to label them. Put an “our fleet” tag on the company’s own cars, say they’re serviced in-house, and list the partner cars next to them. It felt like the honest thing to do.

We didn’t do it. Every car gets the same kind of listing, and there’s no badge.

Think about what you’d do as a customer. Same price, one car belongs to the company and the other belongs to someone you’ve never met. You’d pick the company’s car. Most people would. So all the bookings go to the company’s cars, the partner cars just sit there, and after a month of nothing the owners leave. The marketplace never gets enough trips to show it can work.

It does mean the company has to stand behind every car on the site like it’s their own. If anything goes wrong with a partner’s car, the customer is going to hold the company responsible anyway, so better to accept that from the start.

The second decision was about the owners. We could have opened applications and signed up as many cars as possible. It would have looked busy. Instead we put up a waiting list. A waiting list tells you how many owners actually want in before you inspect anybody’s car or tell them to expect bookings. Sign people up before there are customers for them and you’re making promises you can’t keep yet.

Then payment. The proposed full-day rate for one of their luxury SUVs was ₦591,250. For bookings that size the site also takes bank transfer, and staff can confirm the transfer without waiting for the car owner to respond.

I thought I was building a booking site. Most of the work so far has been figuring out how people here choose, who they trust, and how they actually pay.